Emdebian ports information

Extending Emdebian Grip to unofficial Debian ports

armhf has moved to official archive support.

Problems and issues

Unofficial Debian ports have several issues which affect how the
ports were handled in Emdebian.

No migrations - Unofficial ports are, by definition,
incomplete. Package builds are sometimes delayed and migrations within
the rest of the Debian will not wait for an unofficial port.

Pool overlaps - Port repositories use separate pool
directories for each port but this causes space problems when
preparing an Emdebian filter repository which folds the pools into
one.

Unreleased packages - Unofficial repositories do not
usually carry source packages. Some packages are unreleased
which can mean that the sources have been patched.

The net result is that unofficial ports can be hard to use within
Emdebian. Packages which are Architecture: all can get pushed
ahead of the Debian version by changes in one of the unofficial ports.
The lack of a testing suite means that the old version of the package
disappears as soon as the next version appears, preventing the creation
of a testing suite at a later date. Some packages might not build on
all ports, causing missing dependencies.

Overall, there is no chance of a port architecture making it
into a stable release, Debian or Emdebian, until officially adopted by
Debian and included into the regular buildd/migration infrastructure.